Wednesday Jul 25, 2012

With the release of Exalogic 2.0.1 and the new Virtual Environment I
have put together a number of short blog entries in a Tea Break
Snippets series that will take the user though various standard
functionality and processes associated with new Exalogic
Implementations.

Thursday May 31, 2012

While the costs of XA transactions are well known (e.g. increased data contention, higher latency, significant disk I/O for logging, availability challenges, etc.), in many cases they are the most attractive option for coordinating logical transactions across multiple resources.

There are a few common approaches when integrating Coherence into applications via the use of an application server's transaction manager:

Use of Coherence as a read-only cache, applying transactions to the underlying database (or any system of record) instead of the cache.

Use of TransactionMap interface via the included resource adapter.

Use of the new ACID transaction framework, introduced in Coherence 3.6.

Disabling hardware multicast (by configuring well-known addresses aka WKA) will place significant stress on the network. For messages that must be sent to multiple servers, rather than having a server send a single packet to the switch and having the switch broadcast that packet to the rest of the cluster, the server must send a packet to each of the other servers.

Applications that rely on partial caches of databases, and use read-through to maintain those caches, have some trade-offs if queries are required. Coherence does not support push-down queries, so queries will apply only to data that currently exists in the cache.

Some NamedCache methods (including clear(), entrySet(Filter), aggregate(Filter, …), invoke(Filter, …)) may generate large intermediate results. The size of these intermediate results may result in out-of-memory exceptions on cache servers, and in some cases on cache clients. This may be particularly problematic if out-of-memory exceptions occur on more than one server (since these operations may be cluster-wide) or if these exceptions cause additional memory use on the surviving servers as they take over partitions from the failed servers.

When integrating Coherence into applications, each application has its own set of requirements with respect to data integrity guarantees. Developers often describe these requirements using expressions like "avoiding dirty reads" or "making sure that updates are transactional", but we often find that even in a small group of people, there may be a wide range of opinions as to what these terms mean. This may simply be due to a lack of familiarity, but given that Coherence sits at an intersection of several (mostly) unrelated fields, it may be a matter of conflicting vocabularies (e.g. "consistency" is similar but different in transaction processing versus multi-threaded programming).

Large clusters (measured in terms of the number of storage-enabled members participating in the largest cache services) may introduce challenges when issuing queries. There is no particular cluster size threshold for this, rather a gradually increasing tendency for issues to arise.

A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve.

About

The primary contributors to this blog are comprised of the Exalogic and Cloud Application Foundation contingent of Oracle's Fusion Middleware Architecture Team, fondly known as the A-Team. As part of the Oracle development organization, The A-Team supports some of Oracle's largest and most strategic customers worldwide. Our mission is to provide deep technical expertise to support various Oracle field organizations and customers deploying Oracle Fusion Middleware related products. And to collect real world feedback to continuously improve the products we support. In this blog, our experts and guest experts will focus on Exalogic, WebLogic, Coherence, Tuxedo/mainframe migration, Enterprise Manager and JDK/JRockIT performance tuning. It is our way to share some of our experiences with Oracle community. We hope our followers took away something of value from our experiences. Thank you for visiting and please come back soon.